A Sunwing pilot who lives in Kelowna captured an amazing celestial sight at 34,000 feet above the earth while flying back from the Dominican Republic Tuesday morning.
Dan Riise has been a commercial pilot since 2004 and he says he's never seen anything quite like this before.
"Right time, right place, I guess," he said.
Riise was in the cockpit on board a flight from Punta Cana to Edmonton on March 25 when he captured a series of stunning photos of a SpaceX launch.
SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket on March 25 at 7:42 p.m. EDT, from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station with 23 Starlink satellites on board.
Riise says he pulled his iPhone 13 out and started taking pictures, "it was pretty hard because it kept wanting to focus on the aircraft windshield. I probably took about 30 shots and those are the ones that turned out the best."
Riise says the photos would have turned out better if he could have opened a window. But that's not possible at 34,000 feet.
It looks like Riise managed to capture the instant the rocket separated from the Falcon 9 craft, "you can kind of see where it separates. When you see the big light. Some of the later footage shows what almost looks like a little triangle ahead of it. I think that's when the rocket separated."
Riise says the plane was still above the Dominican Republic when the show started and he initially had no idea there was a rocket launch scheduled.
"I didn't actually know what it was when I first saw it. We sort of looked at it for a second. And then we're like, oh, it must be some sort of a spaceship launch and it was," Riise says.
"Definitely Space X, because we asked air traffic control afterwards."
Riise says he got on the plane's intercom to let passengers know about the incident but it was directly in front of the plane so passengers did not have a direct view.
